


Just a Soul (Whose Intentions Ain’t Good)

by beccabuchanans (vestigialwords)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-04
Updated: 2015-10-04
Packaged: 2018-04-24 19:04:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4931608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vestigialwords/pseuds/beccabuchanans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>RumRogers Soulmark AU: Any and all intelligence on Rogers’ soulmark has been heavily redacted in every single file in existence... except for the yellowed manila folder Alexander Pierce places on Rumlow’s desk one afternoon shortly after the Chitauri invasion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just a Soul (Whose Intentions Ain’t Good)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Turtle_Goose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Turtle_Goose/gifts).



> Warnings for emotional manipulation and Rumlow being generally awful. 
> 
> Prompted by the incredible [needshiswheezy](http://needshiswheezy.tumblr.com) with whom I have a healthy “lets see who can make the other sadder” battle going. There's no such thing as a winner. 
> 
> Also posted on [my tumblr](http://damnrogers.tumblr.com/post/130485093269/just-a-soul-whose-intentions-aint-good-pg).

The SSR had documented every last mark and scar on Rogers’ body: The mark on his right ankle from his bout with chickenpox; the vaccination scar on his left arm; the neat line on his abdomen where Sarah Rogers had sewn up her own son after carrying his eight-year-old body to an understaffed clinic for an emergency appendectomy; the jagged but shallow Z on his neck where a drunken sailor had taken a broken bottle to his throat after Steve stepped in to prevent him from beating his pregnant wife. They were all meticulously documented--color, length, width, depth--and placed in his file. Approximately sixty-five years after Captain America went missing in the Arctic, much of this information was published among the miscellaneous files in the infamous WikiLeaks scandal.  

His soulmark, however, is designated Top Secret and shared strictly on a need-to-know basis. The only government individuals known to be privy to this information were Dr. Abraham Erskine, SHIELD Director Margaret Carter, and Rogers himself. There are no photographs of his mark floating around on the government intranet--indeed, no digital copies at all. This intelligence has been heavily redacted on every single file in existence... except for the yellowed manila folder Alexander Pierce places on Rumlow's desk one afternoon shortly after the Chitauri invasion.

“Your mission is on Page 47,” he says, “Deep Shadow protocol.”

Rumlow nods and places the file in his inbox and tries to forget about it for the next few hours. He fails. As much as he hates to admit it, he spends the rest of his day with his stomach churning. Shadow protocol missions are highly sensitive. Their parameters are never to be exposed during business hours, and their teams are often left in the dark until the last possible moment. Plausible deniability and compartmentalization are key to any successful Shadow operation.

He's worked enough Shadow missions to be aware that a majority of his STRIKE team is also under shadow protocol, that John Garrett can be trusted, and that there's an up-and-coming recruit named Ward who shows promise.

He's not supposed to know any of that though, and for the sake of his own ass, he keeps his fucking trap shut.

This will be his first time working under Deep Shadow Conditions.

* * *

As team leader, he is often away from his office. At the Triskelion, he is often accompanied by his assistant, Kelly, who’s innocent as a flower, but without whom he’d never get anything done. Alternately, he’s down at the range making sure his guys are top-notch and ready for action, or reviewing maneuvers with Rollins, his second-in-command. He’s 98% sure Rollins is also with HYDRA, but the man is hard to pin down.

It’s almost a week later before he has an hour alone to read the file.

He commits the entire thing to memory like his life depends on it--and it does. He thumbs through the file page by page, committing every scrap of intelligence to memory as if it had been disclosed personally.

The conversations might have gone something like this:  

_Page 11:_

Rogers buys him a beer and they talk baseball. Rogers bitches endlessly about the Dodgers picking up and moving across the country and Rumlow hounds him about the Yankees.

Rumlow hates the Yankees.

_Page 23:_

They commiserate about their time spent behind enemy lines. Rogers regales him with war stories of slaughtering his enemies, razing HYDRA troops left and right. (Rumlow struggles to keep his cool). He responds with a laugh and a toast and fudges some details about his days in Iraq. He plays himself off as a Patriotic New Yorker, believing he was fighting the Good Fight in the wake of September 11th.  

That he wasn't a mercenary for a private security firm whose real mission was to ransack the coffers and safes of any and all rich men they found--enemy and ally alike. That he didn’t ransack museums and historical sites for treasures worth millions on the black market.

That he is the soldier his SHIELD file professes him to be.

_Page 36:_

Steve is not straight. He confesses this with a serious face and a sheepish smile over a bottle of whiskey. Steve has drunk most of it. Rumlow is pouring his share out when Steve isn’t looking. He claps Rogers on the shoulder and adopts a practiced slur.

“Join the club.”

_Page 46:_

A photograph, the colors faded with time, but somehow all the more striking for it. Rogers stands naked as the day he was born, arms spread out, his jaw set and serious. His eyes avoid the camera and his cheeks have flushed red. It catches Rumlow’s eye immediately: black marks on the front of Rogers' torso.

Rumlow turns the page, anticipation rising in his throat.

_You know, I think you’re gonna be the death of me._

Those ominous words inscribed in black loopy handwriting, slung low from hip to hip.

Rumlow hordes this knowledge like gold.

* * *

It’s three long months before Strike Team Alpha is assigned to Cap’s beat. Rumlow directs his men into the Quinjet five minutes before takeoff. Cap is up in the cockpit chatting and laughing with the pilots as Rumlow straps into his seat for liftoff. Cap doesn’t buckle in through the ascent. Instead, he hovers over the Co-captain’s chair and clutches at the safety handle bolted into the ceiling.

Once they reach cruising altitude, the pilot clears the team to unstrap.  Cap takes his position at the Operations screen to begin his briefing. Rumlow activates the recorder in his headset, the audio streaming back to his computer at the Triskelion. The crucial moment could come at any time during this mission, and if he’s off his game for one second, he’s as good as dead.

He zips shut his mouth through the briefing and Rollins, bless that man, steps into his shoes without missing a beat. Definitely a Shadow operative. Jack asks every question Brock would have thought to ask and a few he hadn’t--he'll have to watch out for that.

It turns out finding an opening isn’t as difficult as anticipated. Getting Rogers to slow down long enough to take advantage proves to be the real challenge. Rumlow misses his first opportunity when Cap fails to deploy his chute according to regulations. The man is a supersoldier, sure, but statistics on surviving a fall from 1500 feet are grim to say the least.

His second chance passes him by as Rogers barrels past him in a mad dash toward the gunfire and plows through a swarm of Baron Zemo’s best men. Rumlow knows he’ll answer for that later if he doesn’t have something good to show for his efforts.

In fact, he misses every opportunity Rogers gives him from Go Time to Rendezvous.

“Kicking himself” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

They’re loading the jet back up after the raid when Rogers’ attention finally returns to Rumlow. He has a grin on his face worthy of a bona fide adrenaline junkie, and Rumlow can’t help but feel a swell of pride as Cap’s eyes sweep over his body. He knows he’s a handsome man and well built--he has no insecurities about this fact.

Then Rogers’ eyes stop roaming and his smile falls. Rumlow follows his gaze down to his own right thigh, his tactical pants soaked red with blood.

The realization hits him a split second before the pain, and he stumbles back onto one of the Quinjet benches. The pain tears through him when the back of the bench hits his leg and he collapses with an undignifed _thud_. Rogers lunges toward him and kneels at Rumlow’s feet. He grabs Rumlow's leg and inspects the wound in his thigh, then leans back toward the cockpit.

“How long ‘til Rendezvous with the Helicarrier?” Rogers snaps at the pilot, unfastening the kevlar of his uniform. Rumlow lets his head fall back to hit the metal paneling of the jet. Any answer exceeding an hour and he risks losing the leg.

“Thirty minutes,” the pilot responds, calm and professional.

“Thank fuck,” Rogers breathes, then turns back to Rumlow. He pulls his white undershirt over his head. Rumlow can’t help but watch the muscles in Steve’s chest flex as he rips a line down the front of his shirt and roll the cloth up. Rogers threads the fabric around the back of Rumlow’s leg, and fastens a tight bow at the front of Rumlow’s thigh.

“It’s the best I can do right now,” he says with a wince. “Sorry.”

Perfect.

“You know, I think you’re gonna be the death of me,” Rumlow grits through his teeth.

Rogers’ fingers still on the double knot over Rumlow’s thigh. He sees the hitch in Cap’s breath and he knows he’s in. Rogers’ back goes stiff and he rubs absently at the nape of his neck. He pats Rumlow’s good leg once, and goes to join the pilot in the cockpit. Rumlow switches off his recorder and passes out.

* * *

 He wakes up in a SHIELD hospital and spends the next three days in bed recovering from his wound. Rogers doesn’t drop by, but Rumlow doesn’t take it personally. Captain America is a hot commodity and Rumlow doesn’t care anyway.

Secretary Pierce brings him a bottle of bourbon which his nurse quickly confiscates. She’s a tiny slip of a thing called Erica, but she’s true to her flaming red hair and bullies him around like she doesn’t give a damn about his protests. Rumlow can’t help but like her.  

The morning he’s set to be released from the hospital, he finds an envelope of cash stuffed under his pillow.

Rollins meets him on the sidewalk outside the hospital, hands folded neatly in front of him. Rumlow nods his thanks and climbs into the front seat of the SUV parked on the curb. While Rollins is walking around the car, Rumlow opens the envelope to look inside--stacks of cash in different denominations, and a single business card for Leviathan Tattoo Parlor. On the back of the card, he recognizes the nurse’s handwriting from his medical charts. She had written neatly, her letters etched bubbly and feminine in a deep blood red ink: _Love, Sinthia_. A little heart floats next to her name, and Rumlow snorts.

Rollins drops him off in front of his apartment, and Rumlow waits for his car to disappear around the corner before hailing a cab. He recites the crossroads of the tattoo parlor in New York and the cab driver lets out a noise of protest. Rumlow reaches into his jacket and drops a bundle of fifty dollar bills on the front seat and the driver puts the car in gear without further question.  

They arrive in the Bronx at about one in the afternoon. He fingers over another $50 and instructs the driver to buy himself some lunch and wait for him around the back.

Rumlow slips through the front door of the parlor. He’s greeted with a smile by a heavily tattooed man behind a glass counter. Without a word, Rumlow slips the business card out of his pocket and slides it across the table. The man’s grin fades and his eyes harden into coal. He snaps his fingers at his blonde assistant and gestures for her to take over the front. He ushers Rumlow into the back room.

Soulmark tattoos had been classified as a fourth degree sexual offense in the early 1970s, after the landmark case Supreme Court ruling of  _Winters v Winters_ established that artificial soulmarks constituted fraud. Use of Soul Ink continued in conventional tattoos until 1982, when the the FDA uncovered that the ink's natural appearance was achieved by grinding and mixing dried soulmark tissue stolen from corpses. The penalties for using Soul Ink are severe and uncompromising, so places like Leviathan are few and far between.

The process hurts more than Rumlow had ever imagined. He has other tattoos--his unit’s insignia rendered with precision on his right bicep and a shadowy skull over his left--but they were nothing in comparison. He opts to ink over his heart, a common location for the soulmarks of soldiers. and needle pierces his skin so deep that it feels like a million knives burying into his chest. The organic ink burns like acid under his skin, and he blacks out after five minutes.

He wakes with a start, the sharp scent of ammonia filling his nose. The artist leans back in his seat and narrows his eyes. Rumlow reaches into his coat pocket and produces another stack of fifties--one thousand for the tattoo work, the rest to buy silence.

When he returns home, the bottle of bourbon is sitting on his nightstand.

* * *

 Captain America is deployed on a long-term mission with the Avengers, and then Rumlow goes to Quantico on a two-month mission to identify potential recruits among the FBI’s graduating class. When he returns, Rogers has taken a personal leave of absence to Arlington for a week to pay his respects to his fallen Commandos. Opportunities to pull the trigger on Operation Page 47 are not going to just fall into his lap.

So he starts training exclusively in the community gym, not the advanced private STRIKE facilities on the upper floors. He knows that Rogers will sometimes come in early in the morning to work with junior agents who show promise but who need extra one-on-one attention.

It’s another two weeks before payoff. He endures fourteen days of sparring with agents so green that it’s almost embarrassing. Fourteen days of grimy mats, sweaty weights, and old-as-shit lumpy heavy bags before Rogers shows his earnest pretty-boy face in the gym. Rumlow takes another few pointed swings at the bag before turning to face Rogers. He's been training shirtless, naturally, to bare the writing on his chest to the world: _It’s the best I can do right now. Sorry._

Rogers’ face splits into a grin from ear to ear.

* * *

Seventy years earlier, a broad-shouldered kid with brown hair and a smattering of freckles across his nose plants himself squarely between some teenagers and a delicate waif of a boy, all skin and bones. The kid takes a punch or two and gets his face bruised and bloody. He spits one of his baby teeth onto the pavement, and pulls out another that was knocked loose in the scuffle. In two hours time, his mother will scold him for fighting until his guest steps out from behind him, and she’ll offer them both a piping hot bowl of chicken soup.

But for now, he turns, face splitting into a vibrant gap-toothed grin. He extends a hand to the boy on the ground.

“Ya know,” he drawls, “I think you’re gonna be the death of me.”

But the little blond boy doesn’t hear him. His ears are filled with blood.


End file.
